Self the Camera
Artist Maria Lassnig lived in New York from 1968 to 1980, discovering her passion for filmmaking there. During this period, she used the simplest means to create pioneering short films that translated her concept of “Body Awareness” into moving images.
Lassnig’s films show her unmistakably unique view of the world – people, animals, and objects take on new forms – and above all of herself. Her characteristic critical and humorous approach, familiar from her paintings, is given a voice – quite literally, as they are synchronized with her own words. “My animation is an art form,” she wrote in one of her notebooks.
Lassnig experimented in her films, was curious and courageous. She used pat terns that are repeated throughout her work, but that are continuously reinvented, something that becomes clear when her films appear in conjunction with her drawings, paintings, and writings from this time.
Maria Lassnig presented her “canonical” films during her lifetime and com missioned Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko to restore her Films in Progress after her death. The exhibition Maria Lassnig. Selbst als Kamera [Self the Camera] shows a selection of her films against a backdrop of paintings and poems created in the USA. What emerges is an intimate look at Maria Lassnig – through her own lens.
Maria Lassnig (b. 1919 in Carinthia, d. 2014 in Vienna) studied painting at the Acade my of Fine Arts Vienna from 1940 to 1945. She began to analyse her “current body states” through drawings and paintings at an early age – a concept she termed “Body Awareness” in 1970 and continued to develop throughout her life. In 1968, she moved her life to New York, making most of her animations and short films there. In 1974, she cofounded Women/ Artist/Filmmakers, Inc., an association of female filmmakers.
Lassnig taught at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1980 to 1989, leading the master class for design theory and establishing an animation studio. In 1988, she was given the Grand Austrian State Prize, awarded to a woman in the field of fine art for the first time. In 2013 she was conferred the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Since 2015, the Maria Lassnig Foundation has been responsible for the comprehensive oeuvre of one of today’s most important artists.
